Order management systems are computer software and/or hardware system implemented by a number of industries to facilitate order entry and processing. Companies, such as catalog companies and those utilizing electronic commerce, use order management systems to receive, process and fulfill customer orders. An order management system makes possible the entering of an order via a website shopping care or data entry system. The system typically captures customer proprietary information and/or account level information for each order. Credit verification or payment processing may then be performed to check for available funds and validate the transaction. Valid orders are processed for warehouse fulfillment, including, picking, packing and shipping of the ordered goods or services.
Business processes are typically modeled by business architects/analysts. A business process may model message exchanges with different systems in a web services environment. The business architects/analysts then provide an information technology (“IT”) designer with the model. The IT designer uses an orchestration language, such as business process execution language (“BPEL”), to code the business process. BPEL processes are typically created in a BPEL editor and a deployed BPEL process is invoked. Because the IT designer and business architects/analysts generally have different skill sets (i.e., the business architects/analysts are familiar with the business process being modeled and the IT designer is familiar with the orchestration language but not the business process), the resulting BPEL process developed by the IT designer may not work as the business architects/analysts imagined. Accordingly, there may be a wide divide between the originally conceived business process model and the implemented model.
Furthermore, BPEL processes are long running (very often active beyond six months), and in almost all cases, they interact with multiple external systems. The interactions with multiple systems are separated by both time (i.e., the interactions are asynchronous) and space (i.e., each interaction is associated with a particular step in the business process flow). Since processing is done by various components that are asynchronous, distributed and self-focused (i.e., loosely coupled), a system that implements deployed BPEL processes cannot employ traditional transaction processing concepts (i.e., “ACID”: Atomic; Consistency; Isolation; and Durability) that involve a commit transaction or a rollback transaction. The system cannot commit or rollback the interactions because the external fulfillment systems may have already committed parts of a transaction. In simple terms, a well defined transaction boundary for the fulfillment systems does not exist.
For example, consider a business scenario when an order is submitted to a system for fulfillment, and the order is in the middle of processing. When the system receives a request to modify the order, a system administrator must perform significant manual work to make the proper adjustments to the ongoing fulfillment process in order to reflect the modifications in the order. Further compounding the problem, if the administrator is slow to respond to a change request, in that lag time, the fulfillment processes can continue to process based on the original order. This further processing may also need to be changed, or undone, once the administrator finally is able to modify the order.
Furthermore, change requests on long running orders typically require adjustment only on parts of the order. However, there is currently no way to selectively adjust a portion of an order in an efficient and automatic manner.